July 7, 2021
Dear Friends,
First and foremost, I hope this message finds you and your loved ones healthy and safe. I wanted to reach out to give you an update on how we are doing at the ASP and in the San Francisco offices.
Everyone at the ASP is healthy and doing well. Almost all our staff have been fully vaccinated. Since mid-March of 2020, staff continues to work and telecommute from our homes. Those staff members responsible for maintaining financial operations are coming into the office, but follow CDC guidelines on social distancing, masking, and disinfecting surfaces. We continue to stay in touch with each other daily and work on projects with our colleagues and partner organizations around the world. As things open up in California, we hope to fully open up our offices sometime in the coming months.
If you are a member, donor, or friend of the ASP, you probably noticed that little, if anything, changed for you in the past year. You continued to receive Mercury, AstroBeat, the ASP Insider, and e-mail communications from us. The AstroShop remained open and continued to process and ship items. ASP Technical Members continued to receive PASP.
I am especially proud of the ASP staff who developed some truly innovative programs designed to serve the public in their time of need. Families across the nation were faced with the enormous challenge of home schooling their children. Science teachers, university faculty, informal educators and amateur astronomers were all supported by ASP’s new virtual programs designed to help them engage a variety of audiences in astronomy.
As our communities continue to open up, we recognize there are still challenges we all face. As Carl Sagan said when reflecting on humanity, “You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
We invite you to review 2020 at the ASP with our newly published online 2020 Annual Report.
Linda Shore, EdD
CEO
